Conventional banking and payment computing infrastructures are often limited in the types of consumer-facing features they may provide. This is due to the monolithic systems, lacking in robust features and programmability, used to conduct payment transactions in a highly-regulated environment. Typically, each actor or service has a defined role or set of tasks that are performed by the particular service's computing systems in accordance with the appropriate technical protocols and legal obligations. Because these computing systems do not have a dynamic feature set and cannot be used to perform tasks beyond their initial configurations, and because these systems can only conduct transactions and execute certain processes falling within boundaries defining those initial configurations, the existing banking and payment computing infrastructure cannot offer robust and sophisticated features. As such, users are often limited in the types of computing features they can expect from financial companies.
Financial institutions whose systems are already part of the existing banking infrastructure are beginning to provide some new features to users, such as aggregating transaction data from across multiple accounts. And there is a growing number of third-party computing services that offer consumers similar new features. These new features can take the form of web-based applications, mobile applications, and application programmable interfaces (API) that interact with one of the various existing systems in the conventional infrastructure. However, these new features are also limited in their sophistication and capabilities, because the systems offering these features are merely gathering transaction data reported from some external system.